The Road From Gap Creek: A Novel Hardcover

by Robert Morgan

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Mama said. “Somebody has got to stay up with the body to show respect. You never leave a corpse unattended.”

  I went back to the kitchen and rebuilt the fire in the stove and made a pot of coffee. Mama added wood to the fire in the living room and we set on the couch sipping coffee and keeping our vigil. Mama talked about Ginny and her ways and her life in the house by the river. Mama talked more than I’d ever heard her talk before. She could remember Ginny from when she was young. Mama said that with her black hair and black eyes she’d looked part Indian.

  “There was a rumor the Peaces was part Indian,” Mama said.

  “Then Muir is part Indian,” I said.

  “No shame in that,” Mama said.

  Later we both got quiet. I think Mama must have dozed off a little. But I didn’t. I set there thinking how quick a life can be over. And wondering where do people go when they die. Do they just vanish? What is the meaning then of all the things they have done and thought, the things they wanted and cared so much about, all their dreams and hopes?

  Far into the night with the house still the flames in the fireplace fluttered like they was saying something. I got up and put two more sticks on the blaze. And then I heard this noise. It seemed to come from the orchard or the pine woods above the pasture. It was a rush of chattering or mocking; it was a crazy sound. It come again like somebody afflicted out in the night raving and guffawing in the dark thickets. And then I knowed what it was. It was the kind of bird called a laughing owl. And it was shrieking and laughing at all the folly and foolishness of the whole world. With Ginny laying there cold and still it was reminding me how little any of us mattered, in the big dark silly and confusing scheme of things.

  PAPA AND MUIR arrived just at daylight. I was afraid Muir would be awful upset, and he was. When he got out of the truck he hugged me with tears streaming down his face. I’d never seen a man so heartbroke. When he went into the house he took the handkerchief off Ginny’s face and kissed her on the lips. He dropped to his knees beside the body and howled with grief. No man in my family had ever done that, and I seen how different Muir was from the Richards men. I stood beside him and tried to think of something to comfort him.

  After a few minutes Mama went to the kitchen and come back with a cup of strong coffee. “Here, you drink this,” she said, and held it out to Muir.

  Muir turned to her, his eyes veiled in tears, and stopped crying. He couldn’t refuse Mama’s offer and command. He wiped his eyes and took the cup.

  “You’ll need some breakfast,” I said.

  Muir cleared his throat and sucked in through his nose. “No,” he said. “I’ll make a casket.”

  Papa come forward and was about to speak. I know he was going to offer to help Muir make a coffin; but then he stopped. I reckon he seen Muir wanted to make the burial box hisself. Papa said he’d drive to the sawmill and get some cedar boards, and he’d stop at Lum’s store and get brass handles for the coffin. Muir went with him, and when they got back Muir spent the whole day sawing and sandpapering and nailing together the coffin.

  The cedar was the prettiest boards you ever saw, rosy pink and tan. Cedar takes a wonderful shine, and Muir sanded and varnished the wood. He carved Ginny’s name with a chisel on the lid of the coffin. It was a pretty piece of work, and Papa stood by and let Muir do it. It was the careful and thoughtful work on the casket that helped Muir more than anything else. I don’t know what he’d have done if he hadn’t had that work to do.

  While Muir was finishing the coffin Papa got his brother Russ and they took their shovels and picks and dug a grave in the Peace cemetery on the hilltop below Buzzard Rock. Some other men come to help them too, and by suppertime the grave was dug. Papa said they’d dug into rock, but it was soft rock, a kind of rotten rock, and they cut through it with mattocks and picks.

  THAT NIGHT WHEN we went to bed I wondered what was the best way to comfort Muir. He’d not slept for two nights, and he’d worked all day on Ginny’s coffin. Fay and Lester and little Duane come down in the afternoon, and Fay had helped me greet people when they come bringing platters of chicken and cakes and pies and casseroles. Everybody in the church seemed to bring something. Preacher Rice stopped by and most of the deacons. Everybody seemed to have forgot that they’d once voted to drop Ginny and her papa from the church membership. Her sister, Florrie, came by and said I’d done a good job laying out Ginny.

  “I done it with Mama’s help,” I said.

  “I’m sure you did,” Florrie said. For some reason Florrie never approved of me, and even now she couldn’t resist letting me know it.

  When it come time for bed and everybody had gone home except Florrie, Florrie said she’d stay up with the body.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Muir said.

  “Well, I’m doing it anyway,” Florrie said. She was as independent and headstrong as Ginny had been, though she never was as religious and intellectual. After her husband, David, had died she’d remarried twice. When the second husband had died, she married a Mr. Connell down in South Carolina. There was rumors that that husband had kept his hunting dogs in the house, and they would grab her biscuits or whatever she was fixing as soon as she took them out of the oven.

  “Either them dogs go or I go,” Florrie had said to him.

  Mr. Connell walked to the door and opened it and said, “Go.”

  People told the story and laughed and said somebody seen Florrie come walking up the road from Gap Creek with a basket of dishes under one arm and her favorite laying hen in the other. After that she’d not married again.

  When me and Muir left Florrie setting in the living room and finally went to bed I figured Muir would be so tired he’d sink into sleep at once. But he didn’t. I guess he was so disturbed by Ginny’s death and memories of his quarrels with her that he couldn’t sleep. He laid in bed and talked about how Ginny had read the Bible every day and subscribed to the Moody Monthly. She could quote the Bible better than any preacher he knew. In the brush arbor meetings a long time ago she’d shouted and danced in the aisles, and spoke in tongues, and even rolled on the floor. She’d had what they called the baptism of fire. She’d quarreled with her husband, Tom, but that hadn’t stopped her from attending the revivals and taking part.

  As Muir talked and couldn’t sleep I held him for what seemed like hours. I could hear Florrie stirring in the living room and kitchen. She must have made herself some coffee for I could smell fresh coffee down the hall. Far in the night I heard the laughing owl in the thicket again. Muir turned over and raised my gown and we made love like we never had before. I reckon it was the power of grief in him that worked so intense and loving. It was like he was possessed with some larger and forgotten power. And I was possessed too, like I was out of myself and in myself at the same time, and it seemed like I had sprouted wings. And it was like we discovered the true lesson from Ginny’s death: that we was still alive and that it was our job and our joy to be loving and alive for each other. After that we slept.

  NOW I EXPECTED that Muir would want to preach Ginny’s funeral, like he’d preached Moody’s. He’d done such a fine job after Moody died, and now he was even more used to preaching. And Ginny was his mama, and he was her favorite child. But the next day when I asked him he said, no, Preacher Rice was the pastor and it was the pastor’s place to conduct the funeral for a member of the congregation. I reckon he remembered all the trouble with Preacher Liner about Moody’s funeral and he wanted things to be peaceful and dignified with Ginny’s funeral.

  But Preacher Rice was not Preacher Liner, and when the pastor come to the house the next day to discuss the funeral he asked Muir if he’d like to speak at the service for his mother.

  “No, you’re the pastor,” Muir said.

  “Could you say a few words about Ginny before I speak?”

  That took Muir by surprise and he hesitated for a moment, like he was about to say no, and then he said yes, he would like to say a fe
w words for the memory of Ginny. I could tell how pleased he was.

  After the preacher left, Muir took a tablet of note paper and a pencil into the bedroom. I seen he was going to write down some of the things he planned to say. He’d learned to write notes for his sermons, and I guess he wanted to say something good for Ginny’s memory. I shuddered just thinking about having to get up in church to say some words at a funeral. And it was twice as scary to think of speaking about your own mama. My knees wouldn’t have held me up for such a talk.

  Muir must have worked for two hours in the bedroom on his sentences about Ginny’s life. When he finally come out he looked tired but relieved. The funeral was to be that afternoon, and after dinner Papa and the other pallbearers put Ginny’s coffin in the back of the Model A truck and drove it to the church. I put on my black dress that had the smocking below the collar. Muir put on his blue serge suit and a silver tie, and if I do say so myself he looked like a Philadelphia lawyer. He folded the sheets of notes he’d wrote and put them in his breast pocket. Fay and Lester drove down to the house and give us a ride to the church.

  I won’t even try to describe the funeral service except to say Muir’s speech was awful fine. There was flowers all around the altar that people had brought, and the coffin made of cedar wood and varnished looked better than anything you could have bought. It was a fine fall day with sunlight streaming through the open windows mellow as the scent of ripe apples. The crickets called from the weeds outside, the ting of the meadow mole tolling and tolling the end of summer.

  Muir had chose not to say the usual things preachers talk about at funerals. He didn’t mention heaven and hell or the many mansions in the sky, the way preachers usually do. Instead he just give a long list of the things that Ginny had loved. It was the simplest funeral speech I’d ever heard, and maybe the best. He said Ginny had loved her house, her rose garden, and the stately junipers around the yard. She’d loved sewing white blouses and making black skirts. She loved giving to the poor and coming to the aid of anyone in need. She’d nursed the sick and comforted the bereaved. She liked to set on the Sunset Rock beyond the pasture and watch the stars come out in the evening. She’d done that since she was a little girl.

  Muir said Ginny loved to walk along the river, all the way down to the Jim Lee Shoals, and she loved to climb the hill above the orchard when the gold leaves was blowing off the hickory trees there. She loved to read the Bible every day as well as stories in the Moody Monthly, and newspapers, and she liked to talk about all the things going on in the world. When she was younger she’d loved Pentecostal services where she danced and spoke in tongues.

  Ginny had loved her husband, Tom, Muir said, however much she’d argued with him, and she had worked hard with him to make their place beautiful and fruitful. Ginny loved her children, and her grandson, Duane. She loved her sister, Florrie, and her brothers Locke and Joe, however much she might disagree with them about some things.

  Muir said that Ginny loved words. She loved the feel of words, their textures, their hints and echoes. She loved to look up words in Grandpa Peace’s big dictionary. She loved to talk and discuss the Bible and the most difficult problems in theology. She loved to tell stories about the old days, about her pa in the Confederate War. She loved to tell stories about Indians, and ghosts, and snakes and panthers, mad dogs and bears. She loved the church and community and worked to help out wherever she could.

  And then Muir described how Ginny had helped him and encouraged him to become a preacher and even to build the church on the mountaintop. He was lucky to have had such a mother. There was not many dry eyes in the church by the time Muir set down.

  It was the week after the funeral, after Muir and Papa had gone back to Fort Bragg to work, that I found Muir’s notes for his talk at the funeral. He’d left the pages on the chest of drawers by the closet in the bedroom. It had been such a good speech I couldn’t resist reading the notes for myself. The ending he’d wrote brought tears to my eyes again.

  “Ginny loved the future,” Muir had wrote. “She loved to think of the time when the war everybody predicts will be over and the boys will come home and the world will be at peace again. It was like she was already in touch with the future and could see her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and all the generations ahead and the world they would make. She loved to think of the generations who came before us and how they inspire the things we do and think every day. She loved to think that the best in people would always come to the surface. I was certainly the beneficiary of her love. I am indeed fortunate to have known her. I feel the strength of her love and vision even now as we are gathered here, even as we say good-bye to her on the banks of the river of forever.”

  Sixteen

  One of the trickiest things for me after I moved back with Mama in 1938 turned out to be knowing what to do with Old Pat when she was in heat. Before that it had been somebody else’s problem. Big as she was and smart as she was, she was still a healthy female. When she was spreeing she wasn’t hardly at herself. She whimpered and run around and you could see blood under her tail. I didn’t want her to run off and mate with some old hound dog or cur dog and have a litter of mongrels to get rid of. The fact was she was too big to mate with most of the dogs around the valley. Maybe that was why it hadn’t happened yet.

  After Troy left with Papa and Velmer to work at the barracks at Fort Bragg I had to look after Old Pat when I was at home. But I wasn’t at home except on weekends. And then I heard they was hiring at the cotton mill down at the lake. No, I never wanted to work in no cotton mill where it was dusty and lint filled the air and your nose got stopped up with lint, and your hair and clothes got covered so you looked all fuzzy. The cotton mill didn’t pay no more than the job at the dime store, but I could live at home and save the five dollars a week I was paying at the boardinghouse.

  But the real reason I quit the job at the dime store and took the job at the cotton mill was that Mama needed somebody to stay with her while Papa and Velmer and Troy was away and Effie was now married and living in Flat Rock. She never would say it herself, but I knowed Mama needed help with all the work at home, and somebody should be there at night with all the tramps and hoboes coming through the country. Every weekend she could, Sharon come down when Troy was at home. But from Sunday night through Friday it was just me and Mama to look after the place.

  I never was sure about predicting when Old Pat would start spreeing. But I come to recognize the signs when she got a little slower and less interested in people, including me. She’d yip and trot off by herself. I’d call her and she’d come but act like she didn’t really want to be with me. I reckon a dog that’s in heat can’t really help the way she feels and acts.

  The surest sign was that other dogs, male dogs, started coming around. The day I’m talking about was one of the warm afternoons in winter when the sun on the south side melts the hoarfrost on the ground and bleaches the old leaves pressed by rain and snow. You feel it’s almost spring, though it’s just February and there’ll be snow to come and maybe blizzards. But because of the warmth and light everything seems open.

  When I got home from the cotton mill around three-thirty there was this little dog following Old Pat around, growling and barking. It was bigger than a feist but littler than a terrier. It was just some kind of mutt, but it wouldn’t go away. I picked up a stick and threatened it, and it backed away but then come back to Old Pat as soon as I turned around. Its thing was hanging down long as a wiener. I wasn’t too worried about that dog, but then I seen two more. One was a beagle and one was a bigger hound, what is called a black and tan. I wasn’t much worried about the little dogs, but the bigger one might actually mate with Old Pat.

  I wasn’t completely ignorant, for I knowed even a big dog like Old Pat could lay on her belly with her tail raised and let a smaller dog mate with her. A bitch in heat just wants to be bred, and she might do whatever is necessary to be bred. I knowed Old Pat couldn’t hardly help herself and coul
d push herself down on the ground so a smaller dog could reach her. It made me mad to see these dogs gathering in our yard and growling and snapping at each other.

  Mama come out on the porch and I asked her what I was supposed to do. She never did let Old Pat in the house. Mama didn’t believe a dog should ever be brought into a house. A dog would bring ticks and fleas inside.

  Just then I seen this dog with long shaggy hair come out of the orchard. It was a collie or part collie, with pretty tan and white and gray hair. A taste of sick dread caught in my throat. The collie was not as big as Old Pat, but bigger than the other dogs. The little dogs barked at the collie and Old Pat pricked up her ears. The collie didn’t come straight toward us but circled the yard, slipping under the Wolf River apple tree and then around the hemlocks. You never heard such barking and yapping as the little dogs made. When the collie got to the hemlock by the chicken coop Old Pat whimpered and started moving toward it.

  “Here Pat, come here,” I said in as strong a voice as I could. When she stopped I grabbed her by the collar. I knowed I couldn’t really hold Old Pat if she lunged away. But she was used to minding me, and I hoped she wouldn’t try to break away. It was a matter of my will against her instincts.

  One of the places I could put her was in the cellar where we kept the canned stuff and sweet taters and Irish taters. But the door to the basement didn’t close completely and there was no lock on it.

  “Put her in the feed room,” Mama said. I seen that was the best hope, for the door to the feed room locked from outside. If I could get her in there and latch the door, none of the other dogs could reach her.

  “Here we go, old girl,” I said to Old Pat. “You’re going to have a new home.” She was reluctant to go, but as I pulled her collar and talked to her she obeyed me. The other dogs barked and yelped and followed us. The collie snarled and snapped at the others.